


Days Of Old

by AlluringMary



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Light Angst, Possibly Unrequited Love, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 20:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17874293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlluringMary/pseuds/AlluringMary
Summary: The Dead can't stay still for too long...Some persons are lucky to find their doppleganger in old oil paintings in the World's most famous museums, others just happen to remember their past lives. You just happen to exist around them.





	Days Of Old

**Author's Note:**

> Shameless excuse to write some more about Haytham and his stupid ponytail

You meet him two days after he’s set foot in New York, the beer in your hand does nothing to even lull you in a soft haze, you regret drinking it. The music isn’t quite loud enough to drown the other party-goers’ buzzing banter, not soft enough to sway to and not fast enough to dance to either.

Basically, it sucks.

You’re nodding along to a long drawn out story from a guy in the same creative writing class as you, two other guys in your group bump in there and then. The lights go out and in your peripheral vision, you spot a glowing beacon.

 

That’s the signal.

 

Along the others, you start singing the humiliating happy birthday song to your friend who you can see twisting in her chair, embarrassed. And there you hear it, juxtaposed to a heavy Brooklyn accent and mangled New York drawls, resounds one light but distinct British lilt. It falters a lot during the song, the owner awkwardly singing along. The candles are blown, the lights turned back on.

And that is when you first meet him.

He has circles miles deep under his eyes, large hands with blunt fingers still raised mid-clap and the look of someone who’s either spent the last hours writing their thesis or still getting used to a different timezone.

“You’re the one with the British accent?” You ask.

He rolls his eyes but turns to you, “Please tell me that’s not a fetish.”

 

Add to that four other beers, a mediocre chocolate cake and three solid hours of conversation and you’ve become unofficial friends with one Haytham Kenway.

That friendship is punctuated by several group projects during the semester, fruitful but unenventful days working as temps for Abstergo, more parties with much less singing, more alcohol, one memorable night where Haytham got high and went on loop about London and your ‘One True Queen’, another unforgettable and unforgiving afternoon when you woke up in the same bed in your birthday suits, more classes and less alcohol.

 

Thankfully, the situation doesn’t get awkward.

Well it does but at least, not by much.

 

You thank whatever God exists because neither of you _brings it up_ _TM_ and you both try to resume the course of your lives and make it so that whole thing never happened.

That’s why you don’t stop hanging out with him, don’t stop sitting next to each other during lectures, don’t stop fucking shit up during work when your supervisor isn’t looking and don’t stop being idiots.

You’re fours hours into dismantling a particularly reticent subcode when the man walks into your bedroom, closes the door and hits you with, “I think I’m losing my mind.” in the most monotonous tone possible.

 

Your hands hover above the keyboard, you blink at your screen. “Psychiatric Center is not too far from here. Just around the corner, really.”

You’re in the residence, just a few blocks shy of Abstergo’s headquarters but it bares the logo on almost every surface. You’ve been living here for four months now with Haytham, an Aussie and two Europeans with outrageously attractive accents you never get to see.

This closeness concerning living accommodations can be awkward at times, especially since you both woke up in the bed right _behind you, head buried under his chin, his snores filling the room, a light sheen of sweat developing where your skin met his_ \--

 

Undeterred, he adds, “Whenever I close my eyes, I can see myself. Older, but sometimes the same age but in another way.” He’s pacing around your room as he so often does and you actually turn in your chair to take a look him.

 

“What you said makes no sense.” Haytham throws you one of those ‘shut up, peasant’ looks you’re so fond of and stops in front of your open window, peering over the sill. The darkened garden and closed swimming pool must be quite the sight because he doesn’t look up when he says, “It’s me I see, I know it’s me. I look the same, I sound the same. But everything’s wrong and I don’t know if I’m going insane or if I’m seeing something else.”

 

“What makes you think those aren’t just dreams? Did someone slip you something?”

 

“I’m not sure how to word it without sounding like a maniac, I’m afraid. I feel like it’s me, like I know the people around me when those…” He hesitates before saying with an equal amount of disgust and wonder, “…‘visions’ manifest. It’s me but in another way.”

 

“Haytham?” You ask, a bit more worried now, “Have you went into the Animus?”

You’ve never entered the simulation despite Abstergo encouraging you to give it a try anytime you walk through the main doors or open your mail. Apparently, your ancestors could have some ‘great potential’ but the unofficial accounts from past users of insomnia, nausea, depression and in the worst case ever recorded; dissociation deter you to the point you feel uncomfortable just looking at the machine.

And now if your closest friend has gone and had his mind corrupted by that invasive--

 

“No, never.” He sighs, leans on the windowsill, “And I don’t think I will for some time.”

 

Shortly after, he asks you to forget about that conversation altogether, blaming it on stress and your demanding schedule and you get back to your assignment. You don’t believe him and get a nice passive-aggressive email from HR after looking up possible side effects from the use of the Animus and Helix systems. Oh and according to a research analyst who corners you at a water fountain two days later, you should _like tooooootally_ give it a try!

Fast forward a few days, you’re entertaining the crowd with a story when Haytham arrives from behind you, joining in the fray. Your punchline doesn’t land quite well but you have a great audience that feels sympathetic enough to fake laugh.

 

“You never end your jokes properly,” Some dude you’ve never met before mocks, he has a mole under his lower lip, that’s weirdly intriguing.

 

“I think I’m actually pretty good, man.” You tried to defend yourself, “You try.”

 

He actually does, but it’s just a pun and it’s so bad you have to fold over not to laugh your lungs out. The guy is great company, although a little tactile. He also has some kind of green swill in hand he never spills despite gesticulating around and your little group join in soon enough, throwing their worst puns at each other.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

 

“Jack,” He answers, smiling, “And you--”

 

“Jack?” Haytham says out loud, frowning, you’d almost forgotten he was there! His tone is confused but inquiring as he asks, “Why are you white?”

 

If jazz_music_stops.jpg wasn’t an overused and dead meme by now, you’d seriously think about using it right this instant, “What?” Jacks asks, perplexed and looking back at Haytham, whose face appears to be torn between embarrassment and shock.

 

“Oh my God, Haytham!” You jump on the occasion, “You can’t just just ask people why they’re white!”

 

Jack throws back his head and barks out a laugh, Haytham takes his leave and you’re left staring at his retreating back. You feel like it’s a responsibility at this point to check on the young hawk and excuse yourself and slink out of the dorm room. You track him down a staircase where he’s leaning over the banister, just looking down the four flights of stairs that separate you from the ground floor.

He wordlessly extends his hand and you hand him your half-empty bottle. He doesn’t even drink it, just stares at the label.

“Do you believe in reincarnation? It’s a hackneyed subject in so many cultures, it must have some truth to it, no?”

 

“Is this about your visions?” You walk up the staircase and sit down on the steps so you have a clear view of his face and not his back anymore.

 

“I think there are memories,” He says softly, almost under his breath, “Those are things that I remember.” He takes a drink from the glass bottle before rolling it between his palms, “I’m sure now.”

 

“What do you remember, then? Events? Conversations?”

 

His eyes get a little misty but his voice stays firm, “Mostly, people too. And my face, my hands, my voice, everything is the same.” He pauses, looks at you, “You have to believe me, I never used Helix or the Animus but what I remember is real. All of this happened before, yes but it happened to _me_.”

 

You’re the one to break eye-contact, now admiring the dusty floor floor in between your feet. Only God knows how much you care about Haytham, how much you’d like to believe him but it all seems surreal, inexplicable and far-fetched.

 

Somewhere, a time goes _ping!_ as you take too much time to respond and he lets out a broken laugh, almost choking it out. You hear the bottle crash down below, shattering in thousands of shards, the liquid running in between the broken glass just as the door leading back to the party swings shut behind him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s inevitable that you run into him, you live in the same space, attend the same classes, are scheduled at the same time for your temp work. You avoid each other readily, you’re too much of a coward to ask about his supposed memories, the weight of them on his mind, you wonder if he is too scared to tell he’s been using Helix, that he fears Abstergo might strike him out of his internship and sweep his tuition from under his feet if he so much as complained about the side effects.

And so, emboldened by tons of research, an open mind and an unusual dose of Adderall, you reach out to him two weeks after the party. Well you don’t quite reach out to him but more or less corners him in his bedroom at 2AM, lock his door behind yourself and wake him up by turning the light on.

 

He winces and twists under his covers, covering his head with a pillow and says, his voice husky muffled because of his pillow, “Whoever you are, get out.”

 

“Haytham, I need to talk to you.” You say, ignoring him, head a little swimming still, “About your memories, get up.”

 

One of his hands relent its hold on the pillow and blindly reach for his phone charging on his nightstand, he gets it up to his face, still squinting, “It’s 2AM, can we do this later?”

 

“No.” You grind out, sitting down on his bed despite his very apparent reluctance to wake up, “Now or I may not have the courage to later.”

 

* * *

 

 

“And you just so happen to have the same name?” You ask, after he tells you everything he remembers, “It’s really strange.”

 

“I don’t understand that either, but I know I’m not insane.”

 

“You gotta admit that’s nuts.”

 

“Are you gonna throw a latte at my lifeless body?”

 

“Classic.”

 

 

You don’t throw a latte at him and you both talk about his potential of being a reincarnation in hushed whispers late at night. He describes the events that allegedly took place around him in a past life, the tragic childhood, the native woman from the frontier whose name he can’t pronounce but admits he feels sad whenever he thinks of her – and you squash down the complaint in your heart at the news, you strangle this feeling, muffle it and bury it into the deepest part of your being – Egypt, Holden, his… ‘son’ and then nothing.

“I feel a little like I felt but it’s not as intense, not as profound. Almost incomplete.” And he says it with such a fond but hurt expression, almost wistful, you feel your heart sink down a little lower in your chest. He nurses a glass in hand as you found out he’s much more open to confess when he’s in his cups, he looks down at it, frowns. “My glass is almost empty.”

 

“Don’t worry," you take his glass in hand and he dutifully follows it with his eyes, you tip the lip of the bottom over the rim of his glass, “I’ll turn it into almost full.”

 

He takes back the glass but doesn’t take a drink form it, instead leans back onto your bed, cheeks set aflame. “Fuck.” He groans, “Fuck.”

 

 

* * *

 

  

The next day is Sunday do there’s no way you’ll make any kind of effort regarding work, your appearance or your hygiene. Haytham is your polar opposite, he even sleeps in matching pajamas and his clothes somehow always look ironed when you know damn well the closest thing there is to an iron in this house in a flat iron that belongs to a fiercely possessive Aussie.

So on a glorious Sunday morning when you’re messily eating cereal without milk in front of some mind-numbing cartoons, Haytham is prim and proper sitting at the table with his markers and papers laid out before him.

He’s not striving to become a lowly research and data analyst such as you but your boss. You take a lot of classes together but he’s more into public and business relations so in the end you’ re the one left with subcodes, C ++ and Python programming.

And somehow, all of this translate to ‘my roommate is a computer scientist’ and he takes to dumping every single little issues he has with his tablet or computer on you.

 

“ It won’t let me log in.”

“It’s not loading.”

“It says no storage left but I deleted a lot of files.”

“What does it mean when it says Trojan ?”

And other glorious inquiries follow suit but today you are greeted with a phone on your naked thighs and an eloquent, “My mail app won’t sync. And I turned if off and on again, first.”

 

You scoop it up, it’s unlocked with a default background picture, typical. You open the app, try and refresh it but a message in bold and red angry alerts you there’s no storage left. Messenger seems to be the leading cause with an old non-updated version of Angry Birds from 2013 and Microsoft Excel.

“ You wanna keep those?”

 

“I deleted that days ago.” He says, frowning.

 

“From the home screen ?”

 

“ How else would I delete that?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

It happens -- for the second time -- suddenly, you’re both drunk and ranting away in your room because one of the Europeans – Austrian, apparently – has thrown a the loudest party in all of New York in your living room. You've indulged quite a bit and have had your fair share of booze yourselves. One second you’re at your desk, spinning in your chair and the next you’re straddling him, breath short his hand burrows in your underwear.

One way or another, you’re both naked with him behind you. It’s rough, quick, it hurts where he grips your skin or smacks it but it feels delicious. You’re a biter and he only finds out when you push him off of you and take the lead, he doesn’t mind too much though judging by the way he groans, moans and twists under you .

 

It’s the morning after when you wake warm and sore that things take a turn for the worst. You wake up first but he’s the one to get up and escape, you don’t share a word.

You find pieces of evidence scattered around, the most obvious being a used condom, the hair tie he left behind in his hasty retreat to his own room and then the most subtle; the smell of his cologne and sweat on your covers, the shapes and aches of the bruises he left behind to decorate your skin.

You stay fixated on the hair tie, so many white men nowadays grow out their hair, so many men with ponytails. When you first arrived in the Big Apple, those unnerved you, they seemed out of place, Haytham’s just felt natural.

Hell, months later, even his 'memories' became somewhat natural.

 

You try -- no one can say you never did -- you do try and fail miserably not to feel regret and torn up from the inside.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if I want to write more about him in this universe or focus on some other characters, possibly Shay since I'm such a white man's whore...  
> Tell me what you think!


End file.
